What will be covered

This outstanding two-day workshop takes you through every step of the Davis Stepping Stones Program, providing exceptional training on how to best work with a young child, or older individual with ASD, at home, school or in a professional therapy setting.

By the end of the workshop, you will come away with:

• a personal set of tools (mental strategies) to help you remain calm and relaxed while working with a young child or student

• a highly effective set of self-regulation strategies to help the child manage stress, regulate their energy, and enhance their ability to focus

• methods for facilitating a greater awareness of self and others

• the ability to teach and actively create the fundamental  life concepts of change, consequence, cause and effect, before and after, using the engaging hands-on method of modeling with plastilina clay, and

• an understanding of how to create meaningful, positive learning experiences in the home, school or external environment to actively explore these life concepts. This enables the child to integrate their experiences into their personal identity, as a framework for understanding the world, and creates a solid foundation for stimulating positive and lasting change.

By the end of the workshop, you will have all you need to support a young autistic child or older non-speaking individual with ASD effectively. You will be able to guide them to:

• increase their self-awareness

• improve self-regulation

• deal more positively with change

• cope with meltdowns, and

• better understand the world around them – all without losing their beautiful uniqueness.

Outcomes experienced

Young children who complete the Stepping Stones Program experience many positive changes. Below are examples of some of the most significant improvements that have been reported back to the Foundation:

• better self-awareness (for e.g. expressing pain appropriately when injured)

• better self-regulation (can calm themselves down)

• fewer meltdowns

• less resistance to change

• willingness to try new things

• increased ability to refer to self as ‘I’ or ‘me’

• increase in imaginative play 

• growth in language

• increased understanding of cause and effect

• can follow instructions using the concepts of before and after